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The hidden cost of AI coding

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Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#361

Post by xandrius »

douglasisshiny wrote: post #355
CrimsonRain wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just bad with prompting or working with very obscure language/framework or bad coding pattern or all of it. I had a talk with a seasoned engineer who has been coding for 50 years and has created many amazing things over lifetime about him having really bad results with AI tools I suggested for him. When I use AI for the same purposes in the same repo he's working on, it works nicely. When he does it, results…

I've had the same experience as the person to whom you're responding. After reading your post, I have to ask: if you're putting so much effort into prompting it with specific points, correcting it often, etc., why not just write the code yourself? It sounds like you're putting a good deal of effort into prompting it. Aren't you worried that overtime you'll rely on it too much and your offhand knowledge will get worse…

Not OP, it be comes natural and doesn't take a lot of time.

Anyway, if you want to, LLMs can today help with a ton of programming languages and frameworks. If you use any of the top 5 languages and it still doesn't work for you, either you're doing some esoteric work or you're doing it wrong.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#362

Post by ang_cire »

cushychicken wrote: post #299
ang_cire wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting to me. Do you love coding , or do you love creating programs ? It seems like the latter given your metaphor being a microphone to make you seem like you could sing well, i.e. wanting the end state itself rather than the achievement via the process. "wanted to sound like him" vs "wanted to sing like him"

I very much like creating programs. The code is a tool. Nothing more. I love the shed I built for my family. I don’t have a single feeling for the hammer I used to build it. For the record: I can sing well. I just can’t sound like Tony Rice. I don’t have his vocal cords or training.

I enjoy using tools to create, very much so. The process is fun to me. The thing I create is a record of the process/ work that went into it. Planning and making a cut with a circular saw feels good. Rattling a spray paint can is exciting.

I made a cyber deck several months back, and I opted to carve the case from wood rather than 3d printing or using a premade shell. That hands-on work is something I'm proud of. I don't even use the deck much, it was for the love of building one.

To be fair, I don't have any problem with people who do their jobs for the paycheck alone, because that's the world capitalism has forced us into. Companies don't care about or reward you for the skills you possess, only how much money you make them (and they won't compensate you properly for it, either), so there's no advantage to tying your self-worth up in what you produce for them.

But I do think that it's sad we're seeing creative skills, whether writing coding composing or drawing, be devalued by AI as we are.

> For the record: I can sing well.

That is awesome! It's a great skill to have, honestly. As someone whose body tends to be falling apart more than impressing anyone, I envy that. :)

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#363

Post by godelski »

apercu wrote: post #265
TrackerFF wrote: post #185

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…

I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result". Of course, everything is on a scale so it's not either/or. But, like you, how I get there matters to me, not just the destination. Outside the context of music, a project could be super successful but if the journey was littered with unnecessary stress due to preventable reasons, it will still leave a bad taste in my mouth…

What's "the result"? Because I don't like how this divide is being stated (it's pretty common).

Seems to me that "the result" is "the money" and not "the product".

Because I'd argue those that care about the product, the thing being built, the tool, take a lot of pride in their work. They don't cut corners. They'll slog through the tough stuff to get things done.

These things align much more with the "loves coding" group than "the result". Frankly, everyone cares about "the result" and I think we should be clear about what is actually meant

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#364

Post by randcraw »

apercu wrote: post #267
yapyap wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea. I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either. So if someone generates…

If they used an algorithm to come up with a cool melody and then did something with it, why look down on it? Look at popular music for the last 400 years. How is that any different than simply copying the previous generations stuff and putting your own spin on it? If you heard a CD in 1986 then in 2015 you wrote a song subconsciously inspired by that tune, should I look down on you? I mean, I'm not a huge fan of elec…

I think you don't look down at the product of AI, only the process that created it. Clearly the craft that created the object has become less creative, less innovative. Now it's just a variation on a theme. Does such work really deserve the same level of recognition as befitted Beethoven for his Ninth or Robert Bolt for his "A Man for all Seasons"?

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#365

Post by simonw »

skydhash wrote: post #351
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trend I've been finding interesting over the past year is that a lot of engineers I know who moved into engineering management are writing code again - because LLMs mean they can get something productive done in a couple of hours where previously it would have taken them a full day. Managers usually can't carve out a full day - but a couple of hours is manageable. See also this quote from Gergely Orosz: Despite b…

> a lot of engineers I know who moved into engineering management are writing code again They should be managing instead. Not to say that they can't code their own tools, but the statement sounds like a construction supervisor nailing studs or welding steel bars. Can work for a small team, but that's not your primary job.

Hard disagree.

I've been an engineering manager and it's a lot easier to make useful decisions that your team find credible if you can keep your toes in the water just a little bit.

My golden rule is to stay out of the critical path of shipping a user-facing feature: if a product misses a deadline because the engineering manager slipped on their coding commitments, that's bad.

The trick is to use your minimal coding time for things that are outside of that critical path: internal tools, prototypes, helping review code to get people unstuck, that kind of thing.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#366

Post by apercu »

ponector wrote: post #342
bluefirebrand wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always distilled this down to people who like the "craft" and those who like the "result". I find it very unlikely anyone who only likes the results will ever pick up the craft in the first place It takes a very specific sort of person to push through learning a craft they dislike (or don't care about) just because they want a result badly enough

I hate IT, will pick literally anything else to work at, but the money is an issue.

I have a love/hate relationship with tech, but it would take many paragraphs to explain it :)

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#367

Post by asdff »

TrackerFF wrote: post #185

Some people love programming, for the sake of programming itself. They love the CS theory, they love the tooling, they love most everything about it. Other people see all that as an means to an end - and find no joy from the technical aspect of creating something. They're more interested in the end result / product, rather than the process itself. I think that if you're in group A, it can be difficult to understand g…

The issue with programming is that it isn't like music or really any other skill where you get feedback right away and operate in a well understood environment. And a lot of patterns are not well designed as they are often based on what a single developer things the behavior ought to be instead of something more deterministic like the laws of physics that influence the cord patterns we use in music.

Nope, your code might look excellent. Why the hell isn't it running though? Three hours later you find you added a b when you closed your editor somewhere in the code in a way your linter didn't pick up and the traceback isn't clear about, maybe you broke some all important regex, it doesn't matter. One second, it's fixed, and you just want to throw the laptop out the window and never work on this project again. So god damned stupid.

And other things are frusterating too. Open a space deliminated python file, god forbid you add a tab without thinking. And what is crazy about that is if the linter is smart enough to say "hey you put a tab here instead of spaces for indent" then why does it even throw the error and not just accept both spaces and tabs? Just another frustration.

Really I would love to just go at it, write code, type, fly, be in the flow state, like one does building something with the hands or making music or doing anything in the physical world. But no. Constant whack a mole. Constantly hitting the brakes. Constant blockers. How long will this take to implement? I have no fucking idea man, could be 5 seconds or 5 weeks and you don't often know until you spend the 5 seconds and see that didn't do it yet.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#368

Post by ang_cire »

ookblah wrote: post #296
skydhash wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a collosal waste of my time > LLM can do it faster, better, and cost me near nothing. And this is one the thing I'm skeptical about. The above use case is a symptom of all code and no design. It is a waste of time because you're putting yourself in a corner, architecture wise. Kinda like building on a crooked foundation. I've never done refactoring where I'm writing a lot of code, it's mostly just copy-paste a…

yes, that is one aspect of it. 1) refactoring. copy paste, re-arrange, extract, delete and rebuild the connection. i have the mental model and tell the LLM do do it across multiple files or classes. does it way faster and exactly how i would do it given the right prompt which is just a huge file that dictates how things are structured, style, weird edge cases i encountered as time goes on. 2) new features or sections…

I love this detailed discussion of how people are actually using LLMs for coding, and I think this rarely happens in professional spaces currently.

I do see more people who seem to be using it to replace coding skill rather than augment it, and I do worry about management's ability to differentiate between those versus just reverting to LoC. And whether it will become a demand for more code, for the same pay.

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#369

Post by ang_cire »

vendiddy wrote: post #263
ang_cire wrote: post #133

This comment section really shows the stark divide between people who love coding and thus hate AI, and people who hate coding and thus love AI. Honestly, I suspect the people who would prefer to have someone or something else do their coding, are probably the devs who are already outputting the worst code right now.

I love coding but I also love AI. I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there. You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly. Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have A…

I love AI as a concept.

I hate the reality of our current AI, which is benefitting corporations over workers, being used for surveillance and censorship (nevermind direct social control via misinformation bots), and is copying the work of millions without compensating them in order to do it.

And the push for coders to use it to increase their output, will likely just end up meaning expectations of more LoC and more features faster, for the same pay.

But FOSS, self-hosted LLMs? Awesome!

Re: The hidden cost of AI coding

#370

Post by asdff »

handzhiev wrote: post #168
voidUpdate wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing I keep seeing people saying to use an LLM to write boilerplate, but like... do you not just copy that from another project where you already wrote it?

No, because it's usually a few years old and already obsolete - the frameworks and the language have gone through a gazillion changes and what you did in 2021 suddenly no longer works at all.

Ehh most people are good about at least throwing a warning before they break a legacy pattern. And you can also just use old versions of your tools. I'm sure the 2021 tool still does the job. Most people aren't working on the bleeding edge here. Old versions of numpy are fine.
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